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Saturday, October 31, 2009

I was just idly scanning this week's GU film blog and in honour of Halloween, there's an amusing thread on the scariest film of all time. Not surprisingly Uncle Jack got the most votes, but I was reminded of a TV series which terrified me as a child. If any of you were born in the late sixties, then you might just empathise with my involuntary shiver if I utter the four fatal words: Quiet. As. A. Nun.....AAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrggggggggggggggggggggggggggg!!It was a cheesy seventies series called Armchair Thriller and was made in the same mould as Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected. But there was something about that blank, black face that was (and actually still is) the stuff of nightmares. Did this freak any of you good people out too?

And the question to go: It's Halloween. Share your childhood TV and film terrors with us. What sent you skittering behind the sofa in fear and trembling? Happy Halloween my friends. Here's enough fodder fpr a sleepless night here.

Oh and.....All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy All work and no play makes Jack a dull boyAll work and no play makes Jack a dull boy All work and no play makes Jack a dull boyAll work and no play makes Jack a dull boy All work and no play makes Jack a dull boyAll work and no play makes Jack a dull boy All work and no play makes Jack a dull boyAll work and no play makes Jack a dull boy All work and no play makes Jack a dull boyAll work and no play makes Jack a dull boy All work and no play makes Jack a dull boyAll work and no play makes Jack a dull boy All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy

Georges Méliès (December 8, 1861 – January 21, 1938), full name Marie-Georges-Jean Méliès, was a French film maker famous for leading many technical and narrative developments in the earliest cinema. He was very innovative in the use of special effects. He accidentally discovered the stop trick, or substitution, in 1896, and was one of the first film makers to use multiple exposures, time-lapse photography, dissolves, and hand-painted colour in his films. Because of his ability to seemingly manipulate and transform reality with the cinematography, Méliès is sometimes referred to as the "Cinemagician."

The narration is by his niece, Madeleine Malthête-Méliès. It's a wonderful little film, with what must have been state-of-the-art special effects in 1902.

the other 30 tracks that I really rate have to be kept for other themes!!

(I tried to guess other peoples tracks and take in the early lists from 'spill.. but I can't get into RR at all.. so sorry if they are your shouts - doing the picture my computer was screaming - 'NO VIRTUAL MEMORY' @ me)

You have itty-bitty dippy birds.We like them too. But then we have griffon-vultures, who also like itty-bitty birds, but only when they're defunct . . . post-flying . . . no longer aeronautically viable, ex-parrots . . .

Moonrise on the Ottawa River, late summer about 60 miles northwest of Ottawa

No point using my words to say what these songs say much gooder eh. This week's topic has made me nostalgic for late autumn - early winter in middle Canada, where I grew up. (You will see on TV during this winter's Olympics that the city of Vancouver has the same climate as mid-England. Luckily there are mountains nearby for winter sport). In most of Canada, winter is 9 months of icy 16-hour nights. By January it's not so romantic anymore and a little nightlight from above is much appreciated.

Travel is great - think we all agree on that and though Berlin is a place I have been before it is a constantly changing and developing place , buildings , culture , politics , events : the outdoor "Topography of Terror" around where the Chancellry buildings used to be between Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse (today Niederkirchnerstrasse), Wilhelmstrasse and Anhalter Strasse , is now awaiting finishing on a permanent indoor home. U2 are playing in front of the Brandenburger Tor FREE on Nov 5th to commemorate 20th anniversary of Mauerfall. Security was massive while we were there as Angela Merkel had just formed a new government and was being sworn in. Policemen with machine-guns on the streets - now that IS scary. And they don't mess about either.Here is a wonderful piece of urban art which is for all to see and you can see how big it is from the pic. Spill points for the following:1. Who made it?2. What is it called?3. Where exactly is it?4. Which are the nearest U-Bahn5. Is it in former East or west Berlin?Massive thanks to all the RR-ers who went to Leeds and gave me a CD - I shall be listening to them now I am back and will put fave tracks on here - X

I'd love to claim that I'd taken this picture when I was fortunate enough to see one of these beautiful birds on Tuesday - unfortunately mine came out so blurred and out of focus that even I'm struggling to identify the brown blob at the centre of the screen as a bird. This is a picture of the now-famous Dipper, a bird which I think has a pretty strong claim to be adopted as the official bird of Readers Recommend. If you've ever had the honour (and it really is an honour) of watching one in action, you'll agree that it does exactly what we do - constantly seeking out new pleasures, bobbing up and down to the music that's surely in its head, twitching its tail in time to the rhythm, and dipping in and out of the water, trying out this and that.

ToffeeGirl and I are off on another walk this afternoon - we're crossing the Forth into the Kingdom of Fife (aka Blimpyland) but only just. A short stroll around North Queensferry is the order of the day - hopefully more interesting bird sightings to report back.

A question for you all: if not the Dipper, which bird/animal should be adopted as the official RR mascot?

EDIT: Thanks to ejd for starting a moon-themed post above. Can we transfer our moon-based activities up there - much as I appreciate the 'traffic', I fear that my poor little dipper's in danger of being eclipsed!

EDIT #2: Apologies to everyone for my revisionist approach to history. I've moved all the non-Dipper/RR familiar comments up to ejd's post above. Sorry if I've lost anything important and sorry if it's made anyone feel at all discombobulated. Particular apologies to Chris whose comments I moved mid-conversation as it were ...

BloodyParadise's posting of Harry Roy's 'My Girl's Pussy', got me thinking how many other 'single entendre' songs were recorded in the 30's and 40's. Here's another one I found by Lucille Bogan and another by Bo Carter.

The more formal team picture from Saturday night's shindig. I can't speak for anyone else, but I had a whale of a time, so thank you all. Apologies to our more sensitive readers about gremlin's hand; I did tell him not to pick his spots, but the camera's timer went off, so ... tough!

Anyway, the other reason for posting this - there was the customary exchange of compilation CD-Rs, and the usual promises to listen and feedback. Given that I was in a nostalgic heavy rock mood when I compiled mine, I'm not actually going to hold anyone to that promise! ☺ All I ask is that everyone attending, or with access to the 'Box (hint, hint!) listens to Track No.19 on mine, and forgives the fact that it was a live recording from a pub gig, and the source cassette is twenty-three years old.

Rock, blues, country, hip hop... all have seen their share of both supergroups and 'academy' groups (members apprentice under a guru then get famous on their own).Comment as you please. Examples (good and bad) and finely crafted essays (good and bad but heartfelt) welcome.

I hadn't heard of the instrument the "hang" before yesterday, when I started listening to The Portico Quartet, it always interests me to hear "new" instruments.

Wiki says:

"A Hang [haŋ] (pronunciation between the vowel sounds in the word 'Hot' and 'Hungry') is a harmonically tuned steel idiophone created by PANArt in Switzerland. It uses some of the same physical principles as a steelpan but with a nitrided surface and structural change of having two clamped shells with a small opening so that the instrument is a Helmholtz Resonator. The creation of the Hang was the result of many years of research on the steelpan as well as the study of a diverse collection of instruments from around the world such as gongs, gamelan, ghatam/udu, drums, and bells. Metallurgical and acoustic research by the makers has led to significant changes and refinement in structure, design, and process over the years since the first Hang was offered."

The Portico Quartet play modern jazz, using the hang amongst other instruments, and it sounds like this (from their new album "Isla"):

I'm really impressed with The Portico Quartet's sound (John Leckie produces the new LP) and will attempt to find their CD at lunch today (an nigh on impossible chore, in this cultural wasteland in which I work). Their first album "Knee Deep In The North Sea" in on Spotify.

Monday, October 26, 2009

Amidst the 12,000 other nominations over on the Mothership this week, I noticed DarceysDad call Soulsavers' (excellent version of) "Some Misunderstanding" his song of the year. The original comes from Gene Clark's 1974 solo masterpiece - one of those albums that's described as an underrated or lost classic so often that it's probably now thoroughly rated and found. But a classic nonetheless.

Considering Clark was responsible for much of The Byrds at their best, it's surprising it's not better known. If you were going to classify it, you'd label it as cosmic-country-soul-gospel-rock. Probably. The songwriting is top notch (although the lyrics sometimes try a little too hard: "said she saw the sword of sorrow sunken in the sand of searching souls" may be overdoing the alliteration just slightly).

Top tracks are probably the aforemnentioned "Some Misunderstanding" (where the lyrics are at their strongest) and the epic closer "Lady of the North", where fiddles duel with wah-wah guitars.

Anyway, since no one else has claimed the slot, I humbly submit it as Album of the Week. It's in the Box, and on Spotify.

I've tried being bad. Never convincingly evil, more stubbornly contrary - just bad enough to get expelled from school in the '60's, imprisoned for skinnydipping in Greece in the '70's, busted in the '80s. Small-time bad. Criminally naughty.So I quite like big-time bad guys. Naughtiness that goes global. And last week, and last month, and last year - three major good-time bad-boys have stuck their heads up over the parapet, and got some Major Recognition. By that I mean that they hit some minor headlines.

Last week Maurice Sendak refreshingly said this about worries surrounding the film of Where The Wild Things Are -

Reporter: "What do you say to parents who think the Wild Things film may be too scary?"

Sendak: "I would tell them to go to hell. That's a question I will not tolerate."

Last month Robert Crumb [cf Fritz the Cat and Mr Natural, and currently residing nearby in the south of France ] published this -

"To take this as a sacred text, or the word of God or something to live by, is kind of crazy. I don't believe it's the word of God," he told Associated Press, referring to the Bible. "At the same time, I think the stories are very powerful."Asked about his next project, he replied: "I guess next I'll tackle the Qur'an. See how that goes over."

Last year? That brings us to Tomi Ungerer - “the most famous children’s book author you have never heard of.”Brought up French in Strasbourg before the war, he underwent schoolboy Nazification for 6 years, which then meant ostracization when the city was reclaimed as French, in '44. He says of Nazism: "They had the strongest songs. And the best graphics."

Today, Tomi Ungerer is among Europe's best-known commercial artists but has been largely forgotten in America, and is unknown in the UK. He made his reputation in the US in the 60's, initially as a children's book author-artist and then as a magazine illustrator, advertising artist and political cartoonist.'Tomi influenced everybody,' says Maurice Sendak. 'No one, I dare say, no one was as original as Tomi Ungerer.'

Those Sgt.Pepper uniforms from WW1? Tomi was wearing one in New York in '64 when the Beatles turned up . . . And those Blue Meanies from Yellow Submarine owe him a nod, too.But his anti-Vietnam art - and his erotic drawings - lost him his publishers - though not his readers.

He was effectively banned in the States, and never appeared in the UK. His name and his books and his 'brand' [from tea-towels to underwear] are still popular all over Europe and in Japan.« My anger is essential to my work. Humour is a defense mechanism against the evils of society».« What interests me is the no-man's-land between good and evil : each side can learn from the other. If hell is the devil's paradise, there is no reason for God not to spend a few weekends there from time to time ... »Tomi was expelled from school - for being 'perverse and subversive'. But went on to win many awards for his work in bringing together French and German culture. A bi-lingual school has recently been named after him.

Not everyone appreciates Ungerer's rude, lewd, skewed sense of humour. I do - but my Mary doesn't. As an artist she respects his skill, but as an early associate of The Women's Press, she finds his work misogynistic. She understands the BDSM game, but still feels his work is anti-women. We agree to disagree.

He finally settled in Ireland, on a farm on the south-west coast with his wife, Yvonne. Which is where we came in. We had just decided to sack ourselves: we were bored with our ceramic design business. Tomi wanted to set up a museum in Strasbourg while Yvonne wanted to explore her inner and outer Tibet. Their schoolboy son liked the idea of living with us and doing his exam years together with his friend, our Daniel. Tomi and Yvonne then wondered if we'd like to look after their farmhouse and horses and dogs, for a winter. It's Ireland's most westerly point, and Three Castles Head was on their land. If you asked me 'What man and what place has most affected you? - I'd have to say Tomi, and here.

Here's Tomi in his studio (with Maurice Sendak) ten years on since we were there, and just as caustic about 'the Establishment - of hypocrisy' - video

And last year on the eve of the opening of the Museum that Strasbourg has donated to him, to house the 9000 artworks and 4000 mechanical toys he's collected over his lifetime and donated to the city. Here.

If this has whetted your interest in his life or his art then there are some good articles, like this NY Times piece or blog posts like this or this will tell you more.

Arte [the French/German culture channel] did a two hour retrospective on him in the late '90's. He phoned the farmhouse to make sure I was taping it for him. [As if they hadn't given him the gold-plated box-set already. Exasperating man.] It's a worthy testament to an extraordinary life.

And when I look at the Baaad Boyz of our cultural times - I think of rats in a maze, eyeing the cheese, eating eachother. And their shootings and crashes and overdoses - mere statistics.

- but Crumb's already had his go. Everyone should have their turn at being bad.

NB It looks as if I have a thing about bottoms. In fact, I've just been sparing you the other bits. You'll just have to go looking for them (may I suggest that seedy bookshop on Charing Cross Road?) in you own spare time. You bad thing, you.

I've been thinking about this for a while, thinking that it might be an interesting addition to our weekly interactions, it might possibly become a fixture like EOTWQ. My idea is that we write stories, ie; we relate events that the group might find interesting and worthy of discussion. I know there's been quite a few that have said, 'Sorry I haven't been around, been too busy etc' but perhaps we can lure them back, maybe even tempt them to contribute?

OK, since I'm first up I'll start by saying that I've never believed the popular press's take on UFO's, I do believe that there are unidentified flying objects but I don't think that they're related to any activity outside of our solar system. Having said that let me tell you about two UFO's that I've seen.

1. This event took place in Long Beach California in the 1970's on a warm golden summer evening at about 6pm. I was going to teach a class at the university and my route there included a residential street that was about 300 yds long and was a very steep hill, on my left were a row of typical California single story houses going the length of the hill and on my right was an open field. I stress this because it's important to understanding my visual perspective. I was driving a VW Beetle. When I was about half way up the hill I suddenly saw to my left, immediately behind the roofs of the houses an enormous sphere, it was larger than 2-3 houses and I could only see the upper 75-80% of it. I instantly stopped the car and applied the handbrake.It was a translucent white sphere with an intense white center which was pulsing about 2 times a second, every pulse sent visible ripples of energy outwards towards the edges of the sphere. The evening sun was directly behind in the west but was below the level of the rooftops so I couldn't see it but I could see that it illuminated the sphere from behind.All of my lifelong disbelief in UFO's vanished in an instant, I was immediately transformed into an absolute believer, I even remember saying something aloud to that effect. I sat transfixed for several minutes.And then the penny dropped. A slight detour. About a hundred plus miles north of LA right on the coast is Vandenberg Air Force base, it's the west coast equivalent of Cape Canaveral. They regularly used to shoot rockets from there down the Pacific range towards Australia, I'm not sure why but they often fired them around 6pm. There was usually a beautiful man-made light show that accompanied them; when the rocket reached it's peak altitude the water vapor in the exhaust contrail froze, the late afternoon sun to the west would cause it to burst into spectacular rainbows and then the piece de resistance, the high altitude winds would twist these rainbows into spectacular colored linear abstract patterns which would usually last 5-10 minutes. I often saw them and was always glad that my tax dollars were being put to such good use.Back to the UFO. The penny that dropped was my realisation that what I was looking at was an exploding missile, the sphere was the smoke, debris, fuel etc. the pulsing center was the ongoing explosion which was actually pulsing visible light energy outwards. It must have exploded at about 60 miles altitude right over the Pacific immediately due west of where I sat. It was spectacular! I went back to being a disbeliever.

2. In about 1953-4 I was living in Suffolk and I'd just come out of the RAF, one clear, warm summer evening, again about 5-6pm, I was walking with my sister along a country lane, ahead of us we saw a small group of 2-3 people standing and staring at the sky. We joined them. If you were to hold a 12" ruler at arms length with your hand level with the horizon the top of the ruler would be approx. 20-30 degrees above the horizon. That was where we were all looking, there was a dull red sphere hovering there, I can't say how far it was but it was as far as the horizon or possibly much more. You know how big the moon looks? about as big as a ping-pong ball in the sky? This was about as big as a marble, bigger than any star or planet but much smaller than the moon. The image I had of it was that it looked like a dull red car tail-light and it just sat there. As we stood watching and talking between ourselves it suddenly started to move, it was directly to the south and in about 15-20 seconds it moved horizontally 90 degrees until it was due west, it absolutely wasn't an aircraft nor a helicopter. If it were and was at that distance it would have taken many, many minutes to travel that 90 degrees, this object did it in seconds. We watched it some more in the west and then suddenly as we stared at it, it vanished, just like that!The next day I wrote a note to the local paper, The Bury [St Edmunds] Free Press asking if they knew anything about it, they printed my letter and replied that there had been numerous enquiries but they hadn't seen it and their enquiries to local RAF and USAF bases hadn't been fruitful.To me, that was and still is an unidentified flying object, and I still don't believe in space aliens.

OK, so what do you think, is this sort of thing a worthwhile addition to our weekly trivia quest?

Does anyone know where I can go and buy a couple of extra days to sneak into this weekend's RR nomination window? This "Songs With Super Solos" topic is almost certainly my favourite in over three years of blogging on GU, yet I've barely scratched the surface of the pool of songs I could easily recommend. Some are well-known enough that they don't really need any further justification, such as Thin Lizzy's Still In Love With You, and Lynyrd Skynyrd's Freebird (which had 23 'Recommend?' clicks the last time I looked - a DsD record). Others, like Jumpin' The Gunn's Shades Of Blue, are criminally unknown.

The above two people - guitarist Andy Gunn and vocalist Vikki Kitson - were part of a VERY young band spotted by the head of Virgin imprint PointBlank Records whilst visiting his mother in Inverness. Next thing they knew, they were on a plane to Memphis, and recording the album named after this song. Vikki was JUST SIXTEEN, FFS !!!

I saw them perform on a late-night TV show hosted by Eddi Reader shortly thereafter, and as this was right at the height of my HMV-£50-Man phase, I bought the CD. I've been wearing it out ever since.

RR Socialisers with my (I think) Mood Indigo compilation already have it, but I'm determined to get PaulMac to at least listen to this, as well as continuing to spread the word, so figure I have no choice but to 'Spill it and then link over here from the mothership.

This is 8 minutes of blues heaven. There's not necessarily anything ground-breaking in the songwriting, but the execution is just about perfect. In particular, that solo does EVERYTHING you could ever want of an electric blues tune.

If you've heard this before, please go over yonder and dond'er. If you haven't, lie back, enjoy, and then go over yonder and dond'er!

These days, Vikki is apparently out of the business and happily domesticated, Andy Gunn has got a little more acoustic and parochial: go here for a listen.

Sunday, October 25, 2009

Just back from Mannheim and a gorgeous concert by the Anouar Brahem quartet, based on this album, The astounding eyes of Rita and held to commemorate 40 yrs. of the ECM label. Fragments can be heard on the ECM site, the album itself is on Spotify.The instruments used are oud, bass clarinet, bass guitar and darbouka/percussion.Particularly recommend Stopover at Djibouti and For no apparent reason, just because I'm listening to the album for the first time tonight, and these tracks seem to best fit the concert as I remember it.

I was expecting something quieter and more "chamber music" like, but the group had a surprisingly dark sound through the bass clarinet and bass guitar, a much more melodic and folk based feel than recent Brahem recordings, though his Arabic roots still dominate, and the Darbouka and bass give it a dynamic, upbeat pulse also seldom present on his previous albums. In parts it was reminiscent of folk-jazz groups like Jimmy Giuffre's fifties ensembles, in other parts I was reminded more of an almost voodoo like, hypnotic feel. Particularly nice was the bass clarinet playing of Klaus Gesing, using the entire register of the instrument and tweaking it to produce the occasional blues or New Orleans riff; Björn Meyer's bass also took in some fine excursions and contributed to some soulful interludes. The plucked Oud and the metallic sound of the Darbouka completed the rich palette of sound generated by the quartet. The interaction of all four instruments was an astounding sonic event- there were so many exquisite moments. The concert was sold out and the audience reaction ecstatic.

Welcome to a special early edition of End of the Week Questions, recorded at the RR Northern Social in Leeds Saturday night. Feel free to post your answers to any of the questions posed, make clever remarks or just engage in general merriment.(iPod version here)

I haven't been to a gig all year (high ticket prices, credit crunch, lack of anything I was absolutely dying to go to), but after a last minute cancelled appointment gave me an unexpected free afternoon today, I managed to get in some record shopping and enough time to surf the internet looking for nothing in particular.

I drifted towards the Load records website and found out that my (and other 'Spillers) beloved Lightning Bolt were finally coming back to Tokyo after the aborted attempt 2 years ago. I sprinted to the nearest convenience store to get tickets, only to be confronted with a "sold out" message. After scrambling around on the internet for a couple of hours looking for another ticket provider and another sprint to a different convenience store, I now hold in my grubby mitts a pair of tickets to Lightning Bolt in Shibuya on November 13th. Yay! The icing on this delectable cake? The mighty Guitar Wolf are supporting (GW and LB released a Japan-only split single at the time of the aborted tour 2 years ago). The cherry on top? The gig falls on my birthday! Woo-hoo!

p.s. the link with the video (apart from the fact that of being very excited) is that I saw Le Tigre play the same venue a few years ago and they opened with this number and I took a slash next to Ad Rock!

I wanted to add a link to Fela's Confusion. It seemed like to large a file to put into Dropbox, but it's such a remarkable song it deserves a special mention. It's unusual for Fela (to my ears) because of the crazy organ (?) solo to start and then the conversation between the organ solo and the drum solo (not a duet, I don't think, cause they don't play at the same time), but of course, being Fela, it's the horn solos you're listening for, or Sax maybe, does that count as a horn? Oops, ignorance on display. Anyway, give it a listen...

Thursday, October 22, 2009

They may not make an appearance until 2.42 in the (very funny and sweet) video, but I bloody love them, they're my last.fm 7th most listened to artist, and they've just foisted 12 new songs on the world, this song's ace but isn't the best thing on the LP by a mile. i bloody love the raveonettes!!

I was looking at some bluenote covers online, and I liked this picture. I'd never heard of Elmo Hope, but I like his name a lot, and I listened a bit on spotify and like his music, too. (Oh, I just said "like" a lot, but I'm too lazy to go back and find a different word). I'm sure there are other spillers who know more about him?

1. What's the best present you've ever given/ what's the best present you've ever been given?

2. A friend of mine recently wrote "there are 2 kinds of people...people who believe there are two kinds of people, and everyone else." I used to think everyone was either a brat or a bully. An old friend used to say everybody is either a fool or a knave, and another old friend used to say everyone was either a big goon or an evil gnome. Have you ever developed a reductive theory about humankind? Or heard of any that you'd like to share?

3. If you could go back and have a drink with your 20-year-old self, what would you talk about? What advice would you impart?

4. I don't think of myself as superstitious, but somehow I've taught my boys some superstitions I've picked up along the way...If you kill a spider it will rain. SHoes on tables and hats on beds are bad luck. If your nose itches it means somebody is thinking about you (Left = brown-eyed, Right = blue). Are there any superstitions that you grew up with? Are there any that are specific to the region where you live? Any that you actually believe, whether you're willing to admit it or not?

5. (sorry, music-related) If you could be in a band, what would it be called? What kind of music would you play?